1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an image forming device having an N-up printing function, an information processing device which causes the image forming device to execute N-up printing, and a recording medium.
2. Description of the Related Art
Some image forming devices such as a copier, a printer, a facsimile machine, and a multifunction machine (multifunction peripheral) are equipped with an N-up printing function. N-up printing refers to printing in which, for example, two pages or four pages are reduced in size and are formed and outputted on a print side of a sheet of paper (a front side and a reverse side in duplex printing, and a front side in single-side printing). N-up printing reduces the number of sheets of paper and therefore achieves paper saving.
As an image forming device having an N-up printing function, a technique is proposed in which the number of reads S performed on an original document is divided by the number of pages P of an original document to be aggregated, and in case of a final page of an original document even though a remainder is not “0”, printing of an image in a page memory is started. According to this technique, a user need not perform an operation to have a blank original document read even if the number of pages of an original document is less than the number of pages required for aggregation (four or eight), such as cases where the original document includes three or seven pages.
In addition, a technique is proposed in which, when performing N-up printing, a preview image of a read original document having N-number of pages is displayed, and by having a user select a separator page, a layout of N-up printing can be easily instructed.
In N-up printing, desirably, paper is utilized in an efficient manner and unnecessary blank spaces are minimized. In addition, while pages are reduced in N-up printing, a reduction ratio of the pages is desirably minimized from the perspective of visibility.